Jules couldn’t say no to his friends, though friends was a loose term after the pounding headache he’d been left with. He poured himself some water and tried to piece together the events after he got off his shift. He’d driven his speeder to a popular clearing in the grasslands. Volt was there with the whiskey he’d started brewing in the hollowed-out remnants of an astromech droid salvaged from Savi’s junkyard a few months back. Volt—a tall, bald human with an unnatural rage toward droids—used his downtime trying to innovate different spirits he could sell to Oga Garra. Jules didn’t have a palate for the stuff, but he liked to support local industry.
Jules had even helped Volt get started, making sure every part of the droid was sealed and the thing could resist the heat. Jules knew that nothing was ever too broken to fix or too old to be repurposed. Like many things, and even people, on Batuu, there was always another life to live. The drink, however—which Volt was advised not to call Volt’s Special Juice—didn’t deserve a second life. Not only did it taste like gargling with rusted screws, it burned something awful going down. The night before, Jules had considered it a good investment, but his stomach said otherwise that morning.
A knock on the door made him wince. Jules shuffled over, combing his calloused fingers through tangles of dark brown hair. Whoever was on the other side of that door at that hour would have to put up with his appearance.
His four-year-old Nautolan neighbor was at the door. Her pond-green skin was smeared with what smelled like baby food. At least he hoped it was baby food. She gaped at him with beetle-black eyes and waved her hand in front of her pert little nose.
“Peee-yew, Jules,” she said in her bright voice. “You smell like Volt.”
Jules shut his eyes and gave a tired sigh, but he couldn’t help laughing at the small girl. “Do you want me to tell your mom about the secret stash of candy under your bed, Ksana?”
She sucked in a breath and righted herself. “You wouldn’t.”
“I could.”
“Don’t be mean, Jules!”
He crouched down to her eye level, suddenly worried that he’d make a child cry before breakfast. “I’m not a rat, Kay. Do you need something? Where’s your gran?”
“Sleeping. We’re out of milk. Do you have some?”
He left the door open to clear out his smell and let her in. They strolled lazily to the kitchen. There was exactly enough green milk left for his breakfast, but he handed the glass bottle over to Ksana’s eager little hands.
Finally, he had purpose for the day. He’d resupply milk! The thought was as disheartening as it was a thought. Maybe he could invest in Bubo Wamba’s milk stand. Though he quickly talked himself out of it as he thought of the way banthas smelled. Surely no better than he did at the moment.
“Remind me why your gran can’t get you milk, Kay?” he asked her.
“She’s sleeping and won’t get up.”
“Maybe I should check and see if she’s alive,” Jules mused.
“She is very much alive,” came a shrill voice from the open door. The elder Nautolan waltzed in, her long purple tentacles speckled with sun spots from a lifetime on Batuu. Jules was certain she’d bash him with her cane the way she had all the neighboring kids when they were younger. He rubbed the ghost of a bruise on his shoulder from a time he’d kicked a ball through her window.
“Bright suns, Mother Katlock,” Jules said without his usual warmth.
“Don’t bright suns me,” she said. “Waking a body up at all hours of the night with your caterwauling. Who do you think you are, Gaya herself?”
“Who’s Gaya?” Jules and Ksana asked at the same time.
“One of the biggest stars in the galaxy!” The matriarch grumbled on about how “this generation” wouldn’t know music if it docked in their ear canals. Jules watched them leave, Ksana chirping her final thanks.
It was already a longer morning than he’d ever had. After a hot shower, Jules felt alive again. On the small kitchen table was a bowl of fruit Belen had left for him as she’d always done after their parents had passed. As he ate, replacing his milk with water, Jules considered that things had never been easy or simple in their lives. Their father always said an easy life was earned by those with the will to make something out of nothing. Jules often wondered if he’d ever measure up to his da’s philosophy. He loved his home planet, mostly because he’d never been anywhere else. But there were days when he was so restless and full of want for the unknown that he scared himself. When Jules had first spoken of quitting, hadn’t Haal, his brother-in-law, laughed and reminded Jules that he wasn’t going anywhere?
Maybe Jules didn’t know what he actually wanted, but he knew what he needed. And that was not to spend the day cooped up in the house. He had the sudden craving for some fried tip-yip from Cookie’s. How was he supposed to think on an empty stomach?
He tugged on his boots and tucked his arms into the deep red coat Belen had sewn for him the previous season as a gift for a good harvest. He was about to step outside when he noticed a small human boy waiting for him in the courtyard. The boy had dark brown skin and was about ten, with a shrewd stare and a floppy hat that always covered his buzzed head. Tap was one of Dok-Ondar’s many runners in town. Jules knew his first day of freedom was over before it started.
“Bright suns, Tap!” Jules said, locking the door behind him. “I was just on my way to—”
Tap cut him off. “Boss has a job for you.”
“How could Dok have a job for me? The suns aren’t even up! Did he forget I don’t work for him anymore?”
“He asked for you specifically. Can’t see why.” Tap lifted his shoulder and dropped it dramatically. “Only ones sleeping in today are you and the puffer pigs.”
“Watch your mouth, kid.”
Tap barked a laugh, but didn’t appear sorry for the insult. “It’s impossible to watch my own mouth when I don’t have a mirror, Jules.”
“Very funny. What’s Dok want?”
“A couple of the runners didn’t show up this morning, and he lost another apprentice to the white masks.”
Jules didn’t think anything of it, as Dok’s runners came and went, sometimes leaving Batuu in the middle of the night without a word. He was used to familiar faces disappearing. A few years back, when jobs were scarce, Jules had started delivering packages for the old Ithorian. That’s how he’d bought his first swoop bike when he was just a little older than Tap. Hearing about the apprentices was troubling, however. They stuck around longer than most, practically worshiping the treasures in Dok’s shop.
Jules’s lingering headache protested. If someone didn’t want to show up to work, why was it his problem? He knew the answer almost as soon as he conjured the question.
He was good, dependable Jules Rakab.
Jules swore under his breath when he remembered he’d left his speeder in the middle of the clearing the night before. That was the last time he was humoring Volt’s Gut Rot. Jules shuddered, then felt a sense of shame as he asked the ten-year-old for a lift.
Jules got on the back of Tap’s beat-up 74-Z speeder bike, barely holding on to the back, which was better fashioned to carry small crates than another person. The fresh dawn breeze beat against his cheeks, and for a few moments, all he could do was watch the rocky terrain dotted with green alight as the suns rose. When he was a little boy, his father would sit and drink hot black tea with his mother on mornings like this. It was an insignificant ritual, but they never seemed to skip it. Sometimes he’d listen to the murmur of their voices before he fell back to sleep.
Tap came to a hard halt, and Jules hopped off the speeder bike in an ungraceful dive. The clearing was a popular place for bonfires and celebrations when the cantina was overflowing with travelers or when Oga raised the drink prices if she knew wealthy convoys had just made port.
“What happened here?” Tap asked, half amazed and wholly terrified.
The memory of the rest of the night was a barrage on Jules’s senses.
He’d drunk his farewell drinks and practiced his aim on the targets they’d lined up. The rows consisted of old Imperial helmets, bottles, and droid heads that must have been in the salvage yard for more years than Jules had been alive. He hated blasters, but after drinking Volt’s Gut Rot, he cleared the targets, then hitched a ride home on the back of a landspeeder.
He didn’t actually remember getting home, but a flash of his sister’s angry face was imprinted in his mind’s eye. Belen wasn’t always so cranky, and she didn’t much care what Jules did with his time as long as he didn’t bring any trouble inside their new apartment. Something had been upsetting her all week, but he didn’t want to pry, especially if it had to do with her marriage.
More than ever, Jules was convinced it was time he set off on his own. He had the spira saved up, but there was something keeping him in the same rut. Most Batuuans his age—those who hadn’t taken off years before and those who hadn’t enlisted in the New Republic Defense Fleet or followed whispers of a new Resistance—were already set in the work they’d be doing for the rest of their lives. They were pairing up and getting married and talking about having kids. He couldn’t imagine doing all that before he’d had a chance to see the galaxy.
Belen’s voice rang in his memory: “Don’t throw a good thing away, Jules!”
She was so worried about her little brother falling in with the wrong crowd or taking off with a bunch of pirates. Sometimes he wondered if the quarters of a smuggler’s ship would be roomier than the cot in his sister’s living room.
Granted, it was a very nice living room with rugs and the knitted throw blankets Belen had been making and selling on the side for years.
“Adult things, Tap,” Jules finally answered, coming back to the present.
“So why were you invited?” Tap countered.
On another morning, Jules would have flicked the kid’s ears, but he let it go. Though the scorched remnants of blasted metal had been cleared out, probably by Volt himself, the smell of wet earth and stale whiskey made Jules’s stomach turn. Blaster bolts left bald patches in the ground and burn marks on boulders. Jules’s speeder, along with two others, was haphazardly leaning on a slab of rock surrounded by wild grass.
Tap waved his hand over his delicate nose. “You couldn’t wait till I was gone to cut one, Jules?”
Jules grumbled but didn’t want to further explain the night’s debauchery. Tap was a good kid, and Jules hoped he’d stay that way.
“Tell Dok I’m on my way, all right?”
Tap gave him a tiny salute, then sped off. Somehow, the kid’s hat always stayed in place.
Jules powered up the speeder. The sooner he was done with Dok’s business, the sooner he could get back to contemplating his daunting, amorphous future.
It seems simple enough, she told herself as she tossed and turned on the bed of her ship. To think she’d nearly let Damar Olin convince her to sell the Meridian. To think she’d let him kiss her and whisper promises about a future that was now erased. She wished she could scrub the thoughts the way she could wipe a droid’s memory systems.
She forced herself to, instead, replay the instructions from Pall Gopal, the Rodian she’d met the night before. This one seemed to be a simple drop-off. Half the payment from Pall and the other half from his contact once she’d made port. It was the easiest money she’d ever been offered, and that meant it was too good to be true.
“Why me?” she’d asked him, sipping the fizzy juice he’d bought her to soothe the desertion and betrayal she’d experienced moments before. He might as well have said, Happy birthday. Your boyfriend is a filthy, lying womp rat.
“The Meridian,” Pall Gopal said. “The original owner, Ixel Garsea, to be exact.” Even hearing her mother’s name stung like a fresh wound. “Your mother did a couple of jobs for me before she settled down. I keep track of my investments.”
“Investments?”
“Sold her the ship you now call home.”
She frowned at that. Her mom did say she bought the ship on Rodia. Or was it from a Rodian?
“My mother never mentioned you.”
“Did she tell you why she named it the Meridian?” Pall waited for Izzy to nod, and she did. “When she saw it fly, it looked like an arrow sailing clean—”
“Across the meridian,” she finished. Her mother didn’t usually tell her stories, but that one was an exception. “So, what, I’m indebted to you because you sold my parents a ship?”
“On the contrary. Your parents and I were square, as far as I remember. May they rest in the Force.”
She wanted to roll her eyes but contorted her features into a stoic calm. Her parents had believed in the ancient cult, much good it did anyone. But she couldn’t insult her only prospect and job offer. If she wanted to be taken seriously, then what choice did she have but to accept it? It wasn’t like she was going to go chasing after Ana Tolla’s crew. They hadn’t truly taken anything from her except her pride and, well, her dignity. Not to mention a day’s worth of work.
Izzy would recover. It wasn’t like she’d ever told Damar that she loved him back when he’d said it months before. She told herself that she didn’t care. Lying to herself made everything hurt a little less, but not by much.
“Thank you,” Izzy said, trying to keep her words even. “How did you know I’d be here?”
“Sad when a generation loses belief, isn’t it?” The Rodian gave a wistful smile as he traced the rim of the cocktail glass. She said nothing. “But to answer your question, I recognized the ship. I’d heard about what happened—years ago. Then I saw your name on the ship manifest.”
Izzy knocked on the table, trying to keep her calm. She narrowed her eyes at him, like she could see through any lies he was telling. She was quite good at telling lies when it suited her, and she’d thought she was good at detecting them. Clearly, when it came to Damar she’d failed.
What was wrong with her? She couldn’t doubt skills she’d taken time to hone, because of that loser. You didn’t think he was a loser when you wished he’d kiss you, she thought, and cringed.
She felt very young when she asked, “What kind of job did my mother do for you?”
“Ixel once did a run for me that no one else would. Too dangerous.”
She knew that was all he would say. Izzy thought of her mother’s fierce green stare, her full lips, beautiful but somehow always set in disapproval at her daughter. She’d spent more time teaching Izzy how to clean a blaster than how to brush her hair, how to fly through an asteroid belt without tearing the ship apart than how to talk to kids her own age. Nothing was too dangerous for Ixel Garsea, even dying. Sometimes she hated her mother for all those things.
She decided the Rodian was telling the truth.
“Sounds like her.” Izzy bobbed her head to the strange music track that had replaced the live band, and managed a grin that didn’t quite reach her eyes. This deal could change her luck after a rotten day. She had to make sure it was worth it. “Is that what this is? Dangerous?”
“Depends on how many questions you can stand to ask without getting an answer. I need someone to deliver a parcel to the Outer Rim.”
“We are in the Outer Rim,” she said.
“Further out. The edge of Wild Space.” Pall touched his chin with Rodian suction-cup fingers, which had always reminded Izzy of flower bells. “It’s straightforward enough. Deliver the parcel, collect your payment, and don’t ask questions.”
She raised a brow. The last time she’d delivered something no questions asked, a dozen varactyl eggs had hatched in her cargo hold. “I like to be prepared in case something I’m carrying is going to eat me.”
“Very well. The contents of the parcel cannot harm you or your ship. It’s locked and you will not be provided with the key.”
“Let me get this straight,” Izzy said, leaning forward. She wanted to believe she had her mother’s ability to steel her facial features, to narrow her eyes into the kind of stare
that had been capable of silencing even a Trandoshan thrice her size. But Izzy didn’t feel as menacing as her mother had once looked. “If something goes wrong I won’t be able to open it?”
“If a simple delivery is too much for you, Izal Garsea, then perhaps you are not your mother’s daughter, and I’ll find someone else.”
She was overcome with the urge to put a hole through his chest. Instead, she took a deep breath and sat back. “If you could find someone else, then why are you wasting my time?”
It was a bluff if she’d ever uttered one. There were hundreds of smugglers and pirates he could hire, especially on Actlyon. “Seems to me like you need me for a more specific reason. So, what is it?”
“My dear girl, no one in the galaxy knows your name, which allows for fewer complications. Like I said. It’s a simple delivery transaction. All of the information is here. I won’t offer again.” He placed a datacard on the table between them.
She should have dumped her drink over his head for that “no one in the galaxy knows your name” comment. He might as well have told her how insignificant she was, how she didn’t matter enough for the people she loved to stick around. No one knew her name? Well, she would change that. With or without Ana Tolla and Damar.
Izzy snatched the datacard off the table and raised her glass. “To new investments.”
He echoed her words. That’s when she realized he hadn’t told her where exactly she was going.
“You can reach me on this and this alone,” Pall said, handing her a holocomm. “I’ll be by your ship later to give you the parcel.” Then he left her at the table.
When she returned to the Meridian to wait for Pall’s delivery, she keyed up the datacard to read about her mission.
After thirteen years, Izal Garsea was returning to Batuu.
On his way to Dok-Ondar’s shop, Jules felt his speeder shudder.
A Crash of Fate Page 3
